Fuller, Kay; McGinity, Ruth; (2024) Resisting English education policy. In: McKay, Amanda and Thomson, Pat and Blackmore, Jill, (eds.) Resistance in Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration. (pp. 65-79). Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group: London, UK.

Text Resistance chapter April 2022 V10 REVISIONS CLEAN FINAL.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 31 October 2025. Download (225kB)

Abstract

School leaders are both agents and disrupters of neoliberal education reform. Where their educational philosophy and political commitment differ from contemporary education policy, they attempt to make sense of the dissonance. They engage with everyday forms of hidden resistance that might lead to increasing engagement with more overt forms by speaking up in public and taking collective action. Thinking about managing the unexpected with critical sensemaking alongside postcolonial studies offers possibilities for the exploration and explanation of headteachers’ policy resistance in the English education system. We focus on three accounts of headteachers’ nonsense-making of English education policy that resulted in resistance. Stories relate to education policy developed by a Conservative-led coalition government (2010–2015) and successive Conservative governments (2015–ongoing). The accounts originate in empirical research that explored headteachers’ critical engagement with neoliberal education reform between 2010 and 2015; analysis of selected media reports of the headteacher-led campaign ‘WorthLess?’ in response to education funding cuts between 2015 and 2019; and analysis of selected media coverage of critical engagement with education policy confusion about school closure/re-opening during the COVID-19 pandemic during winter 2020–2021. Headteachers’ resistance was motivated by their inability to make sense, their nonsense-making, of education policy owing to philosophical and political differences, the practicalities of school management and questions of plausibility during the pandemic. We argue critical sensemaking and postcolonial studies provide useful theoretical lenses to explain three forms of policy resistance in educational leadership management and administration. We aim to contribute to the debate about the role of agency, contextual (non)sensemaking, critical sensemaking theory, and theory fusion with postcolonial studies.

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